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01 Dec 2015

Fees could be SA’s higher education greatest triumph

Robert Janssen Director of Direct Sales Operations at Ricoh SA
Business Process Services

Gritty review of the student-lecture ratio may pluck victory from doom

Higher education in South Africa has to revisit its education delivery process if it’s to figure a way out of the fees issue and into a sustainable future.

Why?

Because nobody has the answers higher education institutions need to meet the currently growing and future needs of its students. New ways of bringing education to students, however, will give them the information they need.

That may sound a little cryptic at this stage but bear with me.

While the fees issue has been thrust upon higher education institutions they were already concerned about numerous other issues. Those range from how to embrace digital technologies, the cloud, and creating new markets, to cyber security, big data, how to more effectively transfer knowledge, better ways of coping with technology, and the combination of social media, analytics, mobile technology, and the cloud.

“Higher education will, by grappling with those issues, inadvertently help resolve the issue of fees.”

In the sense that higher education institutions are also businesses they experience contradictory demands in their operating environments. On the one hand they want more students per lecturer to maximise revenues. However, they must also maintain high standards of education to maintain or improve their reputations, which is achieved by keeping the student-to-lecturer ratio as low as possible, to draw the best potential students in the future. Better students result in higher pass rates, more research, more intellectual property, and a combination of any or all of sales, licence fees, royalties, and profit sharing.

It is the student-to-lecturer ratio coupled to an ability to maximise revenues that will ultimately determine the future feasibility of higher education in South Africa.

Many of South Africa’s top higher education institutions have already begun using the cloud to deliver lectures via the Internet. They’re becoming quite good at it too. They’re beginning to share parts of lectures, or even entire lectures, via the Internet, which students can download or view on anything from their mobile devices to desktops.

It is the process though of how students and lecturers interact with the technology at their disposal, that will make or break the success of these initiatives. Students must use the facilities at their disposal and lecturers must make them available.

“It enables lecturers to cope with many more students, exploring the fundamentals in the classroom and lecture halls while students shine their torches deeper via the new channels that are being created.”

By doing so they interact with the systems digitally and leave a digital footprint. It gives higher education institutions an unparalleled ability to gauge the level of interaction, to see what works and what doesn’t work, to find the best process for exploring this new academic frontier.

Many higher education institutions don’t need new devices to enable this. Many already have them. In fact, 77% of higher education institutions have some of the latest devices but are actually hindered by the back end legacy systems many still operate. Paradoxically, 73% invest in new technology without fully realising the scope of their existing investments.

Academic media is largely document-based. Online delivery requires some form of document and information process to support the delivery of content by academic services.

Institutions that take a more strategic approach to their infrastructure will augment traditional classroom teaching. They will create an environment of independent learning and interactive collaboration that makes them better at engaging students and lecturers. And that helps them improve the student-to-lecturer ratio so crucial to maximising resources.

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